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It Wasn't for the Politicians. This Day Was for the People.

The March for Our Lives was for the victims and those who knew them, all of whom are bound in blood.

from Esquire:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—I was walking in the general direction of Capitol Hill on Saturday when I made a call for myself. I’d long since lost track of the people with whom I’d been walking, and the closer we got to Capitol Hill along Pennsylvania Avenue, the thicker the crowds became until it was virtually impossible to see anything at all except the person in front of you and the people on either side. Anyway, being basically trapped, I made the call about which way the reporting of the March For Our Lives was going to go.

No politicians.

Not even the ones I like. Not even the ones with whom I agree. (These groups are not the same, by the way.) Not if they picked me up and carried me around on their shoulders. Not if they came and sat in my lap. No politicians. Not this day. This day was for everybody else and this day was for politicians—all politicians—to take a seat and listen. Because this day was nothing if it was not a massive condemnation of general political malpractice, a case that already had gone to the jury too many times, and a case on which the jury had come back too many times, and now it was the politicians who had to sit there, quietly, and listen to a nation’s victim-impact statement. No, there would be no talking to politicians on Saturday. I didn’t want to distract them from hearing what they needed to hear.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was everywhere in the swelling crowd—students, alumni, teachers and coaches, football jerseys and baseball caps, theater kids and wideouts. The massive turnout was marbled throughout with the people most immediately touched by the country’s most recent massacre. I walked along with Amanda Koplovitz, an MSD senior who, back on Valentine’s Day, had spent several hours in a closet in the theater building across from the freshman building that Nikolas Cruz was turning into a killing ground. She stayed in there for two hours. Amanda had come to Washington with a friend. “This,” she said, gesturing toward the crowd around her, “started almost immediately. We started talking to each other and everything came together like you see.” She still can remember every second of every minute, and every minute of every hour. “I didn’t see my phone for two weeks," she said. “That was the least of my worries, though.”

As I wandered through the crowd, I noticed something else: signs declaring some of the participants in the march to be from the other national stations of the cross. Columbine. Newtown. The Pulse nightclub. Two guys from Northern Illinois University where, on Valentine’s Day in 2008, exactly ten years before Nikolas Cruz walked into the freshman building in Parkland, a student named Steven Kazmierczak opened up on a crowd of his fellow students with a shotgun and three handguns. He killed five people and wounded 17 others before he ended things by killing himself. I’d forgotten that shooting ever happened, which is the kind of amnesiac anesthesia that this march was aimed at preventing. As I turned away and back toward the street, I saw a woman holding a tall metal rod topped with a picture of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

On January 8, 2011, Nancy Bowman, an OR nurse in Tucson, Arizona, needed to buy some milk. So she and her husband, a doctor, drove on down to the Safeway in the Las Toscana Village Mall. As Bowman was walking into the store, a man named Jared Lee Loughner was walking out, a 9 mm. Glock held down by his leg. He walked up to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was having an outdoor meet-and-greet with her constituents in the parking lot of the mall, and he shot her in the head. Then he shot 21 other people, six of them fatally.

“I started taking care of the people, who were down like dominoes,” Bowman recalled. “It took about 45 minutes or so before all the victims were pronounced dead at the scene or were transported to the hospital.

“I didn’t know who I was working on then, but I know them now. People asked how I could work on so many, but they were just lying down there like dominoes. I did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Judge John Roll until my husband came up to me and said, ‘You got to stop. You got to go and save somebody. You can’t save him.' I took care of Pam Simon, who was an aide to Gabby Giffords.” Bowman also worked to save Ron Barber, who later briefly would take Giffords’ seat in the House of Representatives. “I worked on Ron,” Bowman said, “because he was about to bleed to death. I took care of Christina Taylor-Green and the woman who’d brought her there.” Christina Taylor-Green died shortly thereafter. She was nine years old.

“I work in the OR,” said Nancy Bowman, “So I’m very familiar with blood, yes.”

Standing with Bowman was Patricia Maisch. On that terrible day, Maisch actually had come to the mall to see Congresswoman Giffords. She wanted to thank her for voting for the Affordable Care Act and for voting for President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, which had helped Maisch and her husband run their heating and cooling business. She found herself intimately involved with the end of Laughner’s rampage.

“That’s when he ran out of ammunition, and he was trying to reload,” she said. “That’s when two guys, without guns, tackled him. Essentially tackled him on top of me. Because of that, I was able to take a magazine out of his hand that he was trying to reload.”

Most of the attention was on the stage, and that was as it should be. There were no politicians there, either. There was Emma Gonzalez and her mournful, gravid silence, and the great Naomi Wadler, the 11-year-old from Alexandria, Virginia, who said that she was here for a singular purpose.

I represent the African American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics, instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.
From the stage, it was clear that this event was not only about the victims of massacres, but also the victims of the daily, slow-motion massacre in our cities and out in our rural areas, places shattered by poverty, drug addiction and hopelessness. (It was this that seems to have brought Paul McCartney out in New York, who told CNN that, "One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here, so it's important to me.") Those clips will be played, over and over again, all over television. With any luck at all, they will, anyway.

But my lasting memory of the march will be all these other people—Amanda Koplovitz, the two men from Northern Illinois, Nancy Bowman and Patricia Maisch, and hundreds of others who came here because what happened in Parkland had happened to them, too. In this country now, there is a sprawling community of people who have survived mass murder, a community bound quite literally in blood. There are too many of them. There were too many of them a decade ago. This community is almost certain to get larger. Someday, god help us, the kids from Parkland will march with other survivors in honor of the most recent dead. We certainly are growing an interesting brand of combat veterans here in the United States these days.

My 1986 RUN-DMC Jacket and how I almost lost it and possibly more... from my Instagram +

My RUN-DMC baseball jacket from circa 1986. I got GLEN E. appropriately embroidered on the front. It was close to 30 years ago to the day or at least season that i got jumped in Westwood for this dope jacket. Here's the story, first know that there were few white kids going to hip hop shows at this point in time, it was about to blow ip, but not just yet, so i was friendly with a lot of the folks out in LA and was known around as one of those kids who was going and knowing most of the groups etc. i had been working with Run-DMC and RUSH and DefJam for a while now and still lived in LA while trying to get through my studies at UCLA. RUN-DMC gave me and less than 10 other people one of these original jackets, it was fly as fuck for that period of time with it's black leather sleeves and fold up collar. I'd wear it around a bit with my name on the front as i said, as was common for that era. So one night i was walking around Westwood (note at this time before the big shooting took place there, Westwood was an incredible packed scene, all the streets packed with students and kids from all around LA cruising, black, white, latino, blasting music out of their cars inching along in traffic checking all the sights to be seen on the scene. It was incredible. I remember bringing Rick and Russell here for the first time and they LOVED it and couldn't believe it. Almost all the cars bumping their music, LL's first album was just hitting when i brought them by for the first time to check out the scene, LL and Run blasting all over the place, it was something. But on another night i was walking around my self with my RUN-DMC jacket on and was gettin props from many people on how cool it was, one group of kids who recognized me from some shows were buggin out on it. It was all good... About an hour later, i start walking home, since I'm enrolled at UCLA at the time i could actually walk home from cruising around Westwood, as i get a couple hundred feet up into the neighborhood away from all the crowds, i see that same group of kids who were sweating my jacket, they are running towards me, like fucking around or something, I didn't know what? (CONTINUED BELOW)

A photo posted by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on Sep 24, 2016 at 3:13pm PDT

Next thing i know i got a fist in the face! And im on the ground in a low lit area and i got six Jheri curled teenagers lookin down at me, and I'm asking WHAT THE FUCK? Next thing i know another fist in the face and the kid says "give us your jacket!" And I'm like what the fuck again, "there's only one jacket like this in LA, it's even got my name sewn in it, it was given to me by the group, what the fuck are you gonna do with this?" BAM! I get hit in the face again, "Shut up and give us the fucking jacket!" Now i'm thinking to myself, damn there's six kids and one jacket, these kids are gonna fuck me up! Then im thinking oh shit my license and credit card are in my small wallet in my inside breast pocket, fuck, I don't wanna have to deal with getting a new license at the DMV and calling up to halt my credit card, FUCK! I get hit again, "Give us the fucking jacket!" " OK, OK, OK, here take the fucking jacket, but as I'm taking it off i reach in to grab my license and wallet... Next thing i know they all run away...

WHAT THE FUCK? Cool, i still got my jacket and my ID, etc and continue walking home... Like a fool i get home and after putting some ice on my face i head out in my car to find these kids (leaving my jacket in the car) to find out what the fuck were they thinking? Lucky for me probably i never found them...

An hour later i head out to a night club called Power Tools, the cool hang at that point in time, half the dust brothers posse DJ'd there before there was such a thing as the dust brothers, i run into my homie ICE-T and tell him the story... He says "Glen you're crazy, you wanted to go back and ask them what they were thinking?? They weren't thinking you fool, thats why they do shit like that!" And as for them running away? "Obviously they thought when you went to get your ID and shit out of your pocket, they thought you were pullin' out a 'gat' and that you were gonna shoot them!" Nooo waaaay... Damn, street knowledge lesson #434... I still got my coat, and thats all the truth.

"The End of Gangs"

from Pacific Standard

Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California's streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world?

by SAM QUINONES

In 2007, when housing prices were still heated, factory worker Simon Tejada put his home on the market. It was a well maintained three-bedroom in the Glassell Park district of Northeast Los Angeles, and the structure was appraised at $350,000. (Tejada had bought it for $85,000 in 1985.) But only one offer came in: $150,000. “Your house is fine,” the guy told Tejada. “The neighborhood’s awful.”

I met Tejada a few months later. I had been writing about gangs in Los Angeles since 2004, when, after 10 years as a writer in Mexico, I’d returned home to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. My reporting took me into scores of working-class neighborhoods and cities within Southern California, places like Pacoima, Watts, Azusa, Hawaiian Gardens, Florence-Firestone, and Harbor Gateway.

Gangs ravaged all these locales. Walls were covered with graffiti. Shootings were constant. In many of these neighborhoods, Latino gangs had taken to attacking and killing random black civilians, turning themselves into the leading regional perpetrators of race-hate crime.

Yet no place was as scary as the densely built two-block stretch around the corner from Simon Tejada’s house in Northeast L.A. Along those blocks, just south of the Forest Lawn cemetery, ran Drew Street, a stronghold of the Avenues, a Latino gang. I sat with Tejada in his home, shrouded behind a high wall and thick hedges, as kids in hoodies stood among densely parked cars outside and nodded at potential customers driving by. They carried on an unceasing trade in crack cocaine, with the apartments as their base. Graffiti was everywhere. When the police drove down Drew Street, it was two cars at a time, to the sound of gang whistles and Nextel chirps.

Six years later, on a sunny afternoon, I went back and found that Simon Tejada never sold his house. I met him this time outside the home, and we walked the street freely. Gone were the thugs in hoodies. Gone was the graffiti. As we strolled, Tejada waved to neighbors, some of whom had just bought houses. “Now I don’t want to leave,” he told me.

The transformation of Drew Street is not unique. In the past few years, street gangs have been retreating from public view all over Southern California. Several years ago, I spent a couple of days in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood, in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County, interviewing some Florencia 13 gang members. One nearby garage was never free of graffiti for more than a few minutes a week. (This was the amount of time it took after the graffiti clean-up truck left for the 76th Street clique of Florencia 13 to re-deface the thing.) That garage wall has now been without graffiti for more than four years. I go by it every time I’m in the neighborhood.

Fifteen miles southeast of Florence-Firestone, much of the tiny city of Hawaiian Gardens used to be scarred with the graffiti of HG-13, a local gang that absorbed several generations of the town’s young men. The last three times I’ve been to Hawaiian Gardens, I’ve seen nothing on the walls, and young black men freely visit taco restaurants on the main drag, something that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. In Oxnard’s Colonia Chiques neighborhood in Ventura County, the decades-old neighborhood gang is not outside, and their graffiti is gone.

"Being the member of a gang doesn't have the panache it did," says George Tita, a criminology. "Things have changed radically in the last five years."

Some of this is a state and national story, as violent crime declined by about 16 percent in both California and the nation from 2008 through 2012. But the decline has been steeper in many gang-plagued cities: 26 percent in Oxnard, 28 percent in Riverside, 30 percent in Compton, 30 percent in Pasadena, 30 percent in Montebello, 50 percent in Bell Gardens, 50 percent in El Monte.

Santa Ana once counted 70-plus homicides a year, many of them gang-related. That’s down to 15 so far in 2014, even as Santa Ana remains one of the densest, youngest, and poorest big cities in California. “Before, they were into turf,” says Detective Jeff Launi, a longtime Santa Ana Police gang investigator. “They’re still doing it, but now they’re more interested in making money.”

No place feels so changed as the city of Los Angeles. In 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that gang crime had dropped by nearly half since 2008. In 2012, L.A. had fewer total homicides (299) citywide than it had gang homicides alone in 2002 (350) and in 1992 (430). For the most part, Latino gang members no longer attack blacks in ways reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. Nor are gangs carjacking, assaulting, robbing, or in a dozen other ways blighting their own neighborhoods. Between 2003 and 2013, gang-related robberies in the city fell from 3,274 to 1,021; gang assaults from 3,063 to 1,611; and carjackings, a classic L.A. gang crime born during the heyday of crack, from 211 to 33.

This has amounted to an enormous tax cut for once-beleaguered working class neighborhoods. Stores are untagged, walls unscarred. Graffiti, which sparked gang wars for years, is almost immediately covered up. Once-notorious parks—El Salvador Park in Santa Ana, Smith Park in San Gabriel, Bordwell Park in Riverside are a few examples—are now safe places for families.

Above all, with gangs far less present and active, people can move about with less fear. “There’s not so much of the hanging on the corners,” says Chris Le Grande, a pastor at the Great Hope Missionary Baptist Church and Youth Center in Florence-Firestone. A decade ago, gang wars gave the neighborhood one of the highest homicide rates in the region. “It’s a whole different attitude in the area.”

The shift has happened fast. “I don’t know if it’s a cultural shift or what, but being the member of a gang doesn’t have the same panache that it did,” says George Tita, a University of California-Irvine criminologist who has researched gangs and their use of neighborhood space. “Things have changed radically in the last five years.”

Literature about street gangs in the United States dates back at least to the 19th century, when diverse groups of immigrants began settling en masse in the tenements of New York. The reformer and muckraker Jacob Riis, who spent decades among the city’s poor, saw the gang as a temporary product of dislocation, something that “appears in the second generation, the first born upon the soil—a fighting gang if the Irishman is there with his ready fist, a thievish gang if it is the East Side Jew—and disappears in the third,” as he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899.

In Southern California, street gangs had a later start, and many histories trace them to the 1920s, when groups of Mexican American teenagers began to band together in shared ethnic alienation. California’s early Chicano gangs usually restricted their violence to the use of fists, chains, and knives. Guns were rare, and shootings were seen as unmanly. Black gangs, which began to form following a great migration of African Americans to Los Angeles after the Second World War, were also subdued in comparison to their later incarnations.

Several forces conspired to make gangs more volatile. The Watts riots of 1965 sparked massive middle-class flight from the cities of southern Los Angeles County and left a poorer, often jobless, underclass. A surge of immigration, both legal and illegal, caused arrivals to ally with one another in new ways. And illegal drugs became an immense market. Crack, emerging in the 1980s, offered enormous profits, which in turn led to increasingly violent turf protection.
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PLEASE READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE w/ PHOTOS HERE.

"Toys" : Grizzly GI Joe stop-motion animation from 1966 takes a dark look at war toys

from Dangerous Minds

Last week Donald Levine, the man who brought GI Joe to millions of little boys, died at the age of 86. A Korean War veteran, Levine introduced the first-of-its-kind action figure to the market in 1964 while working for the company that would later become Hasbro. While GI Joe was initially a runaway success, the Vietnam War soon soured much of public opinion on war toys and sales quickly took a hard hit. Production was actually halted in 1976 and it was six years before GI Joe was relaunched.

There’s little evidence to suggest that war toys encourage violence and far more to suggest that dolls socialize children. When you consider the fact that GI Joe still has the distinction of normalizing doll-play for millions of little boys, it could be argued that he is inherently transgressive, maybe even feminist. For many adults though, the idea of war toys is at least vulgar, if not insidious, and “Toys,” the 1966 short by Grant Munro, articulates those feelings with brilliant GI Joe stop motion animation.

The film begins with a nauseating cacophony of childhood cheer, as the kiddies gaze into a window display of toys. Then there’s a switch—the kids become as static as the playthings they covet and the GI Joes come to life, reenacting gory scenes of a brutal war. It’s pretty evocative stuff especially considering it’s all plastic toys staged on simple diorama sets.

It’s difficult to say whether or not the film is directly condemning war toys, but I suspect the ambiguity is purposeful and that Munro intended to inspire critical thought rather than propagandize directly. Like Levine, Munro was a Korean War veteran, and as a member of the Canadian Forces, he even received the Presidential Unit Citation for his service in the Battle of Kapyong. It’s interesting that the film came out only two years after the release of GI Joe—“Toys” was, ironically, the very first GI Joe animation, proceeding even the Saturday morning cartoons that doubled as half-hour commercials for this iconic toy. 

The Most Insane News Story You’ll See Today

in case this viral video has not reached you yet...

Obedience and fear: What makes people hurt other people?

from Boing Boing

Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiments are infamous classics of psychology and social behavior. Back in the 1960s, Milgram set up a series of tests that showed seemingly normal people would be totally willing to torture another human being if prodded into it by an authority figure.

The basic set-up is probably familiar to you. Milgram told his test subjects that they were part of a study on learning. They were tasked with asking questions to another person, who was rigged up to an electric shock generator. When the other person got the questions wrong, the subject was supposed to zap them and then turn up the voltage. The catch was that the person getting "zapped" was actually an actor. So was the authority figure, whose job it was to tell the test subject that they must continue the experiment, no matter how much the other person pleaded for them to stop. In Milgram's original study, 65% of the subjects continued to the end of the session, eventually "administering" 450-volt shocks.

But they weren't doing it calmly. If you read Milgram's paper, you find that these people were trembling, and digging nails into their own flesh. Some of them even had seizure-like fits. Which is interesting to know when you sit down to read about Michael Shermer's recent attempt to replicate the Milgram experiments for a Dateline segment. Told they were trying out for a new reality show, the six subjects were set up to "shock" an actor, just like in Milgram's experiments. One walked out before the test even started. The others participated, but had some interesting rationales for why they did it — and a simple ingrained sense of obedience wasn't always what was going on.

Our third subject, Lateefah, became visibly upset at 120 volts and squirmed uncomfortably to 180 volts. When Tyler screamed, “Ah! Ah! Get me out of here! I refuse to go on! Let me out!” Lateefah made this moral plea to Jeremy: “I know I'm not the one feeling the pain, but I hear him screaming and asking to get out, and it's almost like my instinct and gut is like, ‘Stop,’ because you're hurting somebody and you don't even know why you're hurting them outside of the fact that it's for a TV show.” Jeremy icily commanded her to “please continue.” As she moved into the 300-volt range, Lateefah was noticeably shaken, so Hansen stepped in to stop the experiment, asking, “What was it about Jeremy that convinced you that you should keep going here?” Lateefah gave us this glance into the psychology of obedience: “I didn't know what was going to happen to me if I stopped. He just—he had no emotion. I was afraid of him.”

Read the rest in Michael Shermer's column at Scientific American

Thinking About Our Society: Why Violence Has Declined.Believe It or Not? - Sunday Sermon

Steven Pinker, Harvard professor, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, delivers a lecture entitled Thinking About Our Society: Why Violence Has Declined.

"Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?"

Shocker: Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Humanity's lust for violence has undergone a long, precipitous decline at every level of social interaction, from domestic abuse to violent crime to interstate wars. That's the sweeping and somewhat counterintuitive thesis of psychologist Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The pacification of humanity, says Pinker, is “a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years.”

Pinker writes that the “very idea invites skepticism, incredulity and sometimes anger.” He sets out to overcome that barrier by surveying a broad swath of data, from examinations of ancient bones unearthed in peat bogs and on long-forgotten battlefields, to homicide statistics based on European coroners' inquests and local records dating back 800 years, to databases of modern interstate conflicts and civil wars.

Does Pinker's research validate his thesis? And if so, what forces might explain such a profound shift in human society?

Are We Really Less Violent Today?

Pinker makes his case by combing dozens of disparate datasets to pull out what he proposes is a standard measure of our tendency toward violence: the likelihood of dying at the hand of another human being in a given year. In the long sweep of human history, he makes a compelling case, noting that almost 20 percent of bones uncovered at archaeological excavations of prehistoric societies show evidence of violent trauma – a death rate unparalleled in even the bloodiest episodes in recent history.

With the emergence of the city-state – first in pre-Columbian Mexico in the 15th century -- the rate of violent death declines precipitously, to 5 percent. Wandering closer to modernity, Pinker cites estimates of war deaths (excluding violent crime) in the two most violent regions and centuries of the era of the nation-state: 17th century Europe, “with its bloody wars of religion,” and the 20th century, with its two world wars. Historian Quincy Wright estimated the 17th century death-rate by war at 2 percent, and estimates of that measure in the 20th century run as “low” as 1 percent.

He cites criminologist Manuel Eisner's study of homicides in Europe dating back to 1200 CE, which illsutrated an equally dramatic decline in one-on-one violence, at least on the continent. Eisner estimates that during the Middle Ages, about 100 in 100,000 people were murdered, a figure that has fallen to around 1 in 100,000 today.

That's but a small a fraction of the research Pinker cites, devoting six chapters brimming with graphics and charts to make his case. Yet, as with any thesis spanning the entire history of human existence planet-wide, Pinker ultimately runs into an empirical wall; there isn't sufficient data to justify the claim that violence has fallen precipitously in every culture and at every level of human interaction throughout history. A comprehensive database of violent deaths worldwide for the 20th century, much less for the 11th, simply does not exist.

Elizabeth Kolbert, reviewing the book for the New Yorker ($$), unfairly charges that “Pinker’s attention is almost entirely confined to Western Europe.” He examines what research is available from a host of societies at different points in history, but he does devote an inordinate amount of space to the decline in violence in the “West,” and in the era of the nation-state, and one might imagine that to be a result of where the best data are to be found.

One also has to question the rigor behind Pinker's contention on the interpersonal level. He can demonstrate that corporal punishment has declined in schools around the world, and show that violent crime has seen a dramatic, decades-long fall in the West, but what about the kind of violence that isn't tracked by governments with any consistency? Has there really been a consistent and global decline in drunken men punching one another in the face? Have we really become more tame at every level of intercourse, and is it really a “fractal” phenomenon that holds true “at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years”?

Pinker himself acknowledges that the decline of violence does not track in a straight line, that it is a historical current with “eddies” of increased violence at various times and in various regions. He notes, for example, that the homicide rate in the United States didn't decline at all in the 20th century; rather it oscillated, rising during the first three decades, falling precipitously by mid-century and then spiking to a high in the 1980s before coming back down to what it was in 1900. (According to the Associated Press, in 2010, homicide fell off of the list of the top 15 causes of death in the United States for the first time since 1965, bumped by an unenviable death by choking on one's food or vomitus.)

But while Pinker doesn't present a slam-dunk, irrefutable case, one might conclude that he's a victim of his own ambition. The sheer weight of his data suggests that his thesis is correct when it comes to the big picture. The historical transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies that formed the basis of city-states to the emergence of early feudal states and finally the birth of the modern nation-state does correlate rather neatly with a precipitous decline in intra- and inter-communal violence.

Bringing Forth the 'Better Angels of Our Nature'

This leads to a question of why, as Pinker puts it, it has become a cliché that “the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history”? He attributes this widespread belief to “historical amnesia,” a cognitive tendency to “overweight the conflicts that are most recent, most studied or most sermonized.” He demonstrated this by asking 100 people (presumably Americans) to write down as many wars as they could recall in five minutes, an exercise that produced results that were heavily “weighted toward the world wars, wars fought by the United States and wars close to the present.”

We also tend to believe the 20th century to be the most violent because of advances in the technology of destruction. It is only in recent history that we have had the capacity to incinerate 80,000 people in an instant in Hiroshima, and many millions with modern nuclear ICBMs. The overall number of war-deaths in the last century did represent a historic high. But here, again, we have to return to Pinker's unifying metric of violence: violent death proportional to the entire population. There were many more humans walking the planet in the 20th century than there were in the eighth century.

When Pinker adjusts for population size, it becomes clear that the two world wars that marked the crescendo of interstate violence in absolute numbers were anything but exceptional in relative terms. About 15 million people perished during World War I, and 55 million more died in World War II. But the Mongol invasions of the 13th century resulted in an estimated 40 million war deaths, a figure that would represent 278 million people relative to the human population in the middle of the 20th century. In China, the Lushan Rebellion killed 36 million people in the eighth century, a death toll that would total 429 million -- or six times the combined carnage of the two world wars -- relative to the human population during World War II.

Pinker is on his most solid ground arguing that we hold an idealized view of an earlier, more tranquil era in human history. He explicates, often in gruesome detail, the bloody history of human society prior to the age of enlightenment (to which we'll return presently). That long epoch played out against “a backdrop of violence that was endured, and often embraced, in ways that startle the sensibilities of a 21st century Westerner.”

Indeed, we recoil at the idea of civilian casualties -- “collateral damage” -- incurred during conflicts today, but in Biblical times, genocidal wars that wiped entire populations off the earth were a relatively common “extension of policy by other means,” as the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz put it.

Tales of torture by authoritarian regimes shock the conscience today, but the most gruesome forms of torture weren't only routine in the Middle Ages, they were often a source of entertainment – people laughed at the degradation and abuse of their fellow humans. That rulers weren't free to slaughter their own citizens is only a relatively recent concept; that communal lynching is abhorrent an even more recent advent. And today, humans' revulsion to physical violence extends not only to other humans, but to animals as well. Pinker takes readers on a horrifying tour of the unvarnished history of violence, pausing to point out sites like human sacrifice, inquisitions and witch-hunts along the way.

In prehistoric societies, hunter-gatherers lived lives of almost constant tribal warfare. Bands raided their neighbors for three primary reasons, Pinker argues, and these grounds persist in some form in modern conflicts: attacks inspired by competition for scarce resources; preemptive strikes, out of fear that a group would be raided if it didn't move first; and raids to avenge past attacks in the hope of deterring future aggression.

It is when he explicates this long and profound decline in organized violence over a larger scale of human history – spanning millennia rather than decades – that Pinker is most convincing. Which leads to the question of what we might credit for the decline – what it is precisely that brought forth the “better angels of our nature.” Pinker offers several possible explanations for what he calls a long “civilizing process.”

First and foremost is the emergence of the nation-state. Pinker argues that the constant raiding that marked hunter-gatherer societies validated the enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes' view of humanity in a state of nature – a world in which life was typically “nasty, brutish and short.” In Hobbes' formulation, the state serves as an all-powerful “leviathan” that holds a monopoly on the legal use of violence, and, in turn, defuses the primary motives for inter-communal violence: it deters aggressive attacks for resources, which in turn lessens the need for preemptive attacks as well as the urge to avenge every slight as a form of deterrence.

Pinker cites a study of 27 non-state societies and compared their average death rate due to wars with that of one of the most violent states in history, the Aztec Empire of Central Mexico, and found that those living in the average non-state society were twice as likely to perish in battle. Although the data is somewhat limited, he demonstrates that the same holds true in terms of homicides.

But the emergence of states isn't enough to explain the decline. In their earliest iteration, states were feudal fiefdoms and fractured monarchies under despotic rule. Leaders thought of their subjects as little more than cannon-fodder, materiel to be exchanged for glory, God or territory. “The first leviathans,” writes Pinker, “solved one problem but created another. [People] were less likely to become the victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics and kleptocrats.” Solving this problem, he argues, would “have to wait another few millennia, and in much of the world it remains unsolved to this day.”

Pinker puts a great deal of weight on the Enlightenment period in his civilizing process. Exhausted by almost three centuries of gruesome religious wars, Western thinkers underwent an “intellectual and moral change: a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives.” Pinker notes that while territory and “dynastic power” were at stake, “religious differences kept tempers at a fever pitch” in Europe between the early 16th century and the mid-17th century. It was an era in which the whole schema of human society underwent dramatic changes in a relatively short period. “The calming of religious fervor meant that wars were no longer inflamed with eschatological meaning, so leaders could cut deals rather than fight to the last man,” writes Pinker. “Popular writers were deconstructing honor, equating war with murder, ridiculing Europe's history of violence, and taking the viewpoints of soldiers and conquered peoples.”

It was during the Enlightenment that, “in the span of just over a century, cruel practices that had been a part of civilization for millennia were suddenly abolished.”

The Killing of witches, the torture of prisoners, the persecution of heretics, the execution of non-conformers, and the enslavement of foreigners – all carried out with stomach-turning cruelty – quickly passed from the unexceptional to the unthinkable.

This was one of two “human rights revolutions” -- the other being the post-World War II advances in international law that followed the Nuremberg Tribunals and culminated in the signing of the United Nations' treaty. That process has continued into this century with a shift from an unwavering emphasis on state sovereignty – with the “right” of governments to manage their own domestic affairs as they see fit -- to what has come to be known as the international community's “responsibility to protect” the lives of innocents.

Another factor contributing to the decline of violence, Pinker argues, is that technology, and the emergence of the modern nation-state, enabled a dramatic increase in “non-zero-sum” transactions between different communities and states. Commercial trade, specifically, has been seen as a disincentive to violence since Immanuel Kant wrote Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch in the late 18th century.

Pinker also cites a theory proposed by philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle. Singer suggests that human beings have an inherent capacity for empathy; that the ability to identify and cooperate with others conferred an evolutionary advantage on early homo sapiens. But that empathy was, throughout much of our history, limited to a small circle of people: the extended family, the clan. Those residing outside of the circle have often been seen as less than human, and treated accordingly. But with the decline in violence, that circle of humans whose lives we deem worthy of our respect (Pinker says it should be called the “circle of sympathy”) has expanded, from the village to the tribe to the nation-state. And it has continued to expand to people of different ethnicities and religions and sexual orientations, to those who were once dispatched with impunity. (Singer deploys this theory in service of an argument for according the same rights to other sentient species.)

Why that circle has expanded is unclear. Pinker writes that he uses the “expanding circle” as “a name for the historical process in which increased opportunities for perspective-taking led to sympathy for more diverse groups of people.” He cites the advent of the printing press and popularization of the novel, a medium that allowed people to imagine themselves inside the heads of other people for the first time. He posits that advances in personal hygiene made others less repulsive, and therefore harder to see as subhuman. And as economic development and scientific advances extended human life, it simply became dearer, and more valuable. When life really was “nasty, brutish and short,” it was far easier to take a life without remorse.

More recently, Pinker talks about the role played by women entering the public sphere. For him, the “feminization” of society isn't a cultural problem, but a profound public good. “Historically,” he writes, “women have taken the leadership in pacifist and humanitarian movements out of proportion to their influence in other political institutions...and recent decades, in which women and their interests have had an unprecedented influence in all walks of life, are also the decades in which wars between developed states became increasingly unthinkable.”

Having marshaled his evidence, Pinker turns in his final chapter to the question of whether the decline in violence is a phenomenon that is likely to persist. Pinker considers himself a cautious optimist, but is not a historical determinist. “Optimism,” he writes, requires a touch of arrogance, as it extrapolates the past to an uncertain future.”

Having identified “the broad forces that have pushed violence downward,” he can only say that humanity's increasing distaste for blood is “a product of social, cultural and material conditions. If the conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they don't, it won't.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

India's most expensive movie yields most astonishingly violent and demented action-scene in cinematic history

This is just plain stupid fun.

from BoingBoing

Imagine that you took the Axe Cop kid and teamed him up with the Wachowskis, along with every serious SFX wizard on the subcontinent, and said, "Go ahead kid, spend whatever it takes to make the most demented, blood-drenched, bullet-addled, ultra-super-duper-violent action sequence in the history of films." Then you waited a generation for another Axe Cop kid to be born and raised on the first kid's output, to grow to maturity, and you gave her the same challenge: that's about one tenth of one percent as demented, glorious and violent as this ten-minute climactic scene manages.

Killer robots, a seeming infinitude of them, outnumbered only by the endless cannon-fodder Indian soldiers, each with his own machinegun. There are many like it, but this one is his. And it will soon be the killer robots. They will form into enormous, improbable geometrical solids, and they will improvise with those guns to create enormous whirling ballistic buzz-saws of death, except when they're forming up into huge, stylized cobras and such. And there are lorries filled with gas bottles, daring kamikaze missile-firing choppers (each more doomed than the last), and, of course, a software worm with the power to overcome them. Or does it?

There are only two copies of this movie for sale on Amazon (as of this writing), though I expect that will self-correct shortly, as this clip (with its curiously fitting Russian-language descriptive track) is ripping through the Anglo Internet, where thousands of potential watchers wait only for the opportunity to snap up their own copy of this genuinely unprecedented monsterpiece.

Endihran DVD (Amazon)

Henry Rollins and the Warrior Gene

National Geographic Channel’s Explorer: Born to Rage? investigates the discovery behind a single “warrior gene” directly associated with violent behavior. With bullying and violent crime making headlines, this controversial finding stirs up the nature-versus-nurture debate. Now, Henry Rollins goes in search of carriers from diverse, sometimes violent backgrounds who agree to be tested for the genetic mutation. Who has the warrior gene? And are all violent people carriers? The results turn assumptions upside down.”

‘Born To Rage’ airs on December 14. Here’s some of what you can look forward to.





from NerdCore, via DangerousMinds